Join us at this year’s ceremony presenting the 2024 Igor Zabel Award and Grants recipients, on 29 November at 8.30 pm in Sokol House, Tabor in Ljubljana. The Award Ceremony will be preceded by a two-day seminar on 28 and 29 November 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art+Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana.
This year, the award programme takes its inspiration from Igor Zabel’s supportive, caring, and cooperative way of working in the field of art and culture. We live in an era of intensifying crises and catastrophes that damage human and non-human life and give rise to oppressive and violent politics and ideologies. In this context, the award programme celebrates practices that are life-affirming, build transversal collaborations, activate emancipatory legacies, and resist oppression and discrimination, cynicism and resignation.
Programme
Recipients of this year’s Igor Zabel Award and Grants will present their work and, more broadly, discuss how art and theory from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe can contribute to the world in these times of exacerbating crises.
Thursday, 28 November 2024
Seminar | Day 1
15:00–16:30, Museum of Modern Art (MG+), Cankarjeva 15, Ljubljana
Transformative Cultural Practices
Lecturers: Irfan Hošić, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu; moderator: Kristina Božič
Friday, 29 November 2024
Seminar | Day 2
10:00–12:30, Museum of Modern Art (MG+), Cankarjeva 15, Ljubljana
Locally Situated Knowledge Production
Lecturers: Edit András, Natalija Vujošević; moderator: Bojana Piškur
Award Ceremony
20:30–22:00, Sokol House, Tabor 13, Ljubljana
2024 Laureate
The jury has given Edit András the 2024 Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory in recognition of her exceptional contribution to counter-hegemonic discourses on Eastern European art and art history writing which emphasize the importance of local conditions and specificities, and promote a more nuanced and localized implementation of critical theories. She is also a critical analyst of the post-socialist condition, and has written and lectured extensively on nationalism and populism in connection to art and culture. As a progressive and critical (feminist) curator, researcher, and author, and also a radical voice against autocracy, András is one of the most dedicated advocates of contemporary visual art and culture in Hungary and the wider region of Eastern and Central Europe.
2024 Grant recipients
The jury has awarded the 2024 Igor Zabel Award Grant to Irfan Hošić in recognition of his inspirational ability to connect art, education, and community-building as well as his ability to propose new initiatives, manage them, and give them the necessary impetus to thrive and have an impact on the societies in which they operate.
The jury has awarded the 2024 Igor Zabel Award Grant to Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu in recognition of his extraordinary ability to create connections across disciplines and geographies, his impressive opus of theoretical texts and public lectures which reflect a deep engagement with cultural and social issues, and his commitment to involving Eastern European artists in international cultural events.
The jury has awarded the 2024 Igor Zabel Award Grant to Natalija Vujošević in recognition of her significant research, historicization, activation, and contextualization of marginalized but globally unique art collections and archives from the socialist Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav periods.
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About the award
The Igor Zabel Award acknowledges the exceptional achievements of curators, art historians, theorists, writers, and critics in the field of visual art and culture in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Named in honour of the distinguished Slovenian curator and art historian Igor Zabel (1958–2005), the award, an initiative of the ERSTE Foundation (Vienna), has been conferred biennially since 2008 in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation and the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory (Ljubljana).
Previous award recipients:
- 2022, Bojana Pejić, art historian, art writer, and curator, based in Berlin
- 2020, Zdenka Badovinac, curator and then director of Ljubljana’s Moderna galerija
- 2018, Joanna Mytkowska, curator and director of MoMA in Warsaw
- 2016, Viktor Misiano, Russian curator, art writer, and editor
- 2014, Ekaterina Degot, Russian curator and art writer, currently artistic director of the steirischer herbst festival in Graz
- 2012, Suzana Milevska, curator and art writer, based in Skopje
- 2010, Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015), Polish art historian
- 2008, What, How & for Whom (WHW), Croatian curatorial collective
Find out more about the Igor Zabel Award on our Project’s Page
